I'm really a library man, or second-hand book man.
The connection between authors, printers, and booksellers must be kept up.
I worked in a bookstore in Oslo, importing the English-language books.
A publisher is simply a useful middle-man.
The want of an international Copy-Right Law, by rendering it nearly impossible to obtain anything from the booksellers in the wayof remuneration for literary labor, has had the effect of forcing many of our very best writers into the service of the Magazines and Reviews.
My bookshelves have no order. I prune them regularly and sell the books to Myopic Books, a Chicago bookstore. They give me store credit, and then I spend all the store credit, and, presumably, return to sell them back more of the books I bought from them.
The book trade invented literary prizes to stimulate sales, not to reward merit.
The book trade is a spiritual barometer of a nations well-being.
There can hardly be a stranger commodity in the world than books. Printed by people who don't understand them; sold by people who don't understand them; bound, criticized and read by people who don't understand them; and now even written by people who don't understand them.
The marketplace for books when I entered the business shortly after World War II consisted of a thousand or so well stocked independent booksellers in major towns and cities supplemented by thousands of smaller shops that carried limited stocks of mostly current titles along with greeting cards, toys and so on.
Paperbacks weren't considered real books in the book trade. Up till then it was just murder mysteries, potboilers, 25-cent pocket books sold in newsstands. When the New York publishers started publishing quality paperbacks, there was no place to buy them.
Everyone in the book's ecology, starting with the author and including the publisher, the distributor, the booksellers, the libraries, and ending up with the reader, should benefit from a healthy book trade.
Selling books is hard to engineer.
The 'beach read' has become such a ubiquitous concept in contemporary literature that we assume it has always been around. In fact, the term only emerged in the 1990s, usually in book trade publications such as 'Booklist' and 'Publisher's Weekly.'
Books seem to me to be pestilent things, and infect all that trade in them...with something very perverse and brutal. Printers, binders, sellers, and others that make a trade and gain out of them have universally so odd a turn and corruption of mind that they have a way of dealing peculiar to themselves, and not conformed to the good of society and that general fairness which cements mankind.
I have been told by an eminent bookseller, that in no branch of his business , after tracts of popular devotion, were so many books as those on the law exported to the Plantations .
I wish there could be an international peace conference of booksellers, for (you will smile at this) my own conviction is that the future happiness of the world depends in no small measure on them and on the librarians.
Librarians in America do something like a couple of billion dollars worth of book business every year.
I'm very privy to the way bookstores work, and I think a lot about the ecosystem that my books have been published in. I think it's great to be aware of how publishing works.
"Out of Print" is bookseller speak for "We can't be hedgehogged".
The great dividing line between books that are made to be read and books that are made to be bought is not the purely modern thing it seems. We can trace it, if we try, back to the first printing-presses.
I'd like to sell a lot of books.
All that are printed and bound are not books; they do not necessarily belong to letters, but are oftener to be ranked with the other luxuries and appendages of civilized life. Base wares are palmed off under a thousand disguises.
